Back in the late 70s an actual scientist working on the plateau found the models the original artists used and then scaled up. She also noted that the plateau was soft ground and joked that it would make a lousy runway to land on.
Quarrying and transporting stones is and obviously always has been well understood, and that makes the achievements of often apparently illiterate cultures that did it even more awesome.
Drilling stones was accomplished by using small stones with at least the same hardness, and turning or twisting them until the holes got drilled. They had the time, they didn’t have TV, movies, or the internet to distract them.
It’s ironic that in this era of labor-enhancing and time-saving technology we don’t appreciate the collective human genius.
“Quarrying and transporting stones is and obviously always has been well understood”. Not really. We’re talking about stones weighing a hundred tons or more. Quarrying was probably the easy part, although not really very easy. How they were moved for miles sometimes and lifted into near perfect position and many times without mortar or cement onto walls and buildings is not really understood. There are only theories no concrete answers. Today we would use enormous cranes. They didn’t have that, and I doubt they could make them out of logs that would probably break, even if they had enough man power to use such a thing. If you know how it was done, and I really don’t mean to be rude, but I would like to know.